Biography

Acerbic view of life in Hollywood

Met future wife Rebecca De Mornay at the Cannes Film Festival of 1989, where he was promoting the film Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989).

"Well, you know, Hollywood is so much a part of me. The thought of writing a straight satire about Hollywood - I would reach for my revolver, as they say." Interview, August 1996.

[on his work] My books are really about human behavior 'in extremis', they're not about people behaving badly or worse now than they were 30 years ago or 10 years ago in Hollywood. No, people behave the way they behave and have throughout time. I never see my books or this script as a commentary or an exposé on Hollywood. I don't see this as satirical. I see it simply as a melodrama that's closer to August Strindberg or Joe Orton than it is to anything like The Player (1992) or Mulholland Drive (2001). David and I thought we were making our Sunset Boulevard (1950), in a way. The original script [of "Sunset Boulevard"] began with a scene of cadavers in a morgue talking about how they had died, how they had come to our demise. Our script is filled with ghosts as well.[2015]

[on the significance of Paul Éluard's poem "Liberté" in Maps to the Stars (2014)] It's a beautiful poem, first of all. It has a kind of rhythmic, incantatory quality that I loved when I first read it. I wasn't aware of its fame - it's studied by schoolchildren in France, and was used during the Occupation - I believe that Eluard wrote it originally as a love poem, and that's how I read it. For me, it's an inevitable mantra that Agatha Weiss [Mia Wasikowska] uses to liberate herself and ultimately her brother from this cycle of incest, bad faith and dysfunction that she was born into and mutilated from in literal and metaphorical ways.[2015]

[on satire] I see satire as Monty Python, as Jonathan Swift, as Francois Rabelais; I don't see anything in Maps to the Stars (2014) that's an exaggeration in order to expose a truth. It's more realism than anything else. It's is a fever dream, it's a melodrama, I don't see it as a satire. The default is to call anything that makes one uncomfortable and in which someone may laugh something satirical or quote 'dark'. I've been hit with that label all my life. I don't believe in only darkness; I'm not interested. I'm interested in the poles: Darkness and light. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Extreme fame, anonymity. The sacred and the profane. Without the profane, I'm not interested. Without the sacred, I'm not interested.[2015]

[from an essay in 'The Guardian', Sept. 18th 2014] My mother died in May and is buried in a crypt next to the legendary screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (_The Grapes of Wrath_), just around the corner from Marilyn Monroe. In my early 30s, Oliver Stone introduced me to Billy Wilder. I'll never forget my frisson on learning that the original script of Sunset Boulevard (1950) began in a morgue, with the corpses all sharing how they met their ends. (It was shot but discarded because it didn't sit well with preview audiences.) That scene was a thematic foretelling of my own corpus to come: phantoms telling stories around a campfire. William Holden begins his "share" as a ghost heard in voiceover while we see his floating corpse. Swimming pools have always been a thread that runs through my work. As a very young boy visiting California for the first time, I looked out the plane's window with shock and wonder at the Elysian mosaic of blue backyard portals. In Maps to the Stars (2014), a five-year-old drowns in one. Like his great-grandfather Holden, he becomes a ghost, but sadly has had no life to share. I mention all this because its weave is the leitmotif informing David Cronenberg's film of my script "Maps to the Stars". Contrary to critics' easy characterisation, it doesn't have a satirical bone in its elegiac, messy, hysterical body. I've given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it. "Maps" is the saga of a doomed actress, haunted by the spectre of her legendary mother; of a child star ruined by early celebrity, fallen prey to addiction and the hallucination of phantoms; of the mutilation, both real and metaphorical, sometimes caused by fame and its attendants - riches, shame and nightmare. I see our movie as a ghost play, not a satire.